Phallus-shaped bronze objects, called tintinnabula, were made in Pompeii and were used by people to protect themselves from the eye of the devil and other malevolent influences, according to the beliefs of the time.

In antiquity, important oaths were sworn by men shaking each other’s penises, which is what we are looking at with the stories of Abraham, et al., giving testimony or testifying by holding each other’s “thighs.” In this regard, the words “testify,” “testament” or “testimony,” etc., come from the Latin root testis, which means “one who gives evidence” and “a testicle.”

Israel’s Male Cult Prostitutes

As might be the case with this Stone Age culture that evidently included fertility cult/sex worship practices, the Israelites kept sacred harlots of both genders, the male cult prostitutes called קדשים qadeshim, the “holy ones,” the singular of which is קדש qadesh, from the root קדש qadash meaning “consecrate, sanctify, prepare, dedicate, be hallowed, be holy, be sanctified, be separate.”

As we can see, as part of their “whoring after” deities besides the tribal god Yahweh, the Israelites, like their Canaanitish predecessors, engaged in typical phallic cult worship found widespread around the Mediterranean and Middle East.

The discovery of Phoenician-styled pottery in a grotto last year even led some scholars to hypothesize that ancient seafarers coming as far as ancient Egypt, such as the Phoenicians, could have wandered as far as Australia at the time.

“The Aborigines tell of a time, the Dreamtime they call it, where the continent was submerged with water. During this Dreamtime, tribes from all over the sea, and of the five colored nations, lived in harmony and prospered together. All this disappeared after a great cataclysm brought on by the mythical Rainbow Serpent God, who in a great flash of light, as strong as a thousand lightning bolts, stole all the water of the Earth and left nothing behind,”

An esteemed professor of archeology was back from a dig in Israel where the oldest settlement in that part of the world had been discovered, along with a tablet containing drawings of what was thought to be the world's oldest writing. The professor was there to give a slide show lecture and the hall was packed, standing room only.

Finally, the tablet was discussed and a likeness of the symbols was put on the overhead projector for all to see. You could hear a pin drop as the Professor explained his findings.

"The first symbol as you see is a woman - which we take to mean that this society held women as equals if not in high respect and as an important part of life, showing their social sophistication. Next we have a donkey, proving their domestication of of animals. Next we have a shovel which ties in with the donkey - in that it symbolizes farming and working of the land, cultivation of crops and building homes. Next we see a fish, further proving this idea of a productive society that had the ability to farm and fish. And last, we see a Star of David, showing that even at the beginning of what we can call recorded history of that area, the people were religious and they saw this religion as the cornerstone of their family, work, and culture together."

The room was quiet, reflecting with admiration, the simple ways of these people.

Then from the back came the voice of an old man.

"Excuse me?", he said. "I don't mean to cause a problem, but you have it all wrong".

"What do you mean?", called the professor as all heads turned.

"Well," said the old man, "this is from Israel, so you're reading Hebrew. Hebrew is read right-to-left. You translated it left-to-right. According to my translation, it should really read:

Radiation still so intense, the area is highly dangerous. A heavy layer of radioactive ash in Rajasthan, India, covers a three-square mile area, ten miles west of Jodhpur. Scientists are investigating the site, where a housing development was being built.

For some time it has been established that there is a very high rate of birth defects and cancer in the area under construction. The levels of radiation there have registered so high on investigators' gauges that the Indian government has now cordoned off the region. Scientists have unearthed an ancient city where evidence shows an atomic blast dating back thousands of years, from 8,000 to 12,000 years, destroyed most of the buildings and probably a half-million people. One researcher estimates that the nuclear bomb used was about the size of the ones dropped on Japan in 1945.

A Historian Comments

Historian Kisari Mohan Ganguli says that Indian sacred writings are full of such descriptions, which sound like an atomic blast as experienced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He says references mention fighting sky chariots and final weapons. An ancient battle is described in the Drona Parva, a section of the Mahabharata.

"The passage tells of combat where explosions of final weapons decimate entire armies, causing crowds of warriors with steeds and elephants and weapons to be carried away as if they were dry leaves of trees," says Ganguli.

"Instead of mushroom clouds, the writer describes a perpendicular explosion with its billowing smoke clouds as consecutive openings of giant parasols. There are comments about the contamination of food and people's hair falling out."

These skeletons are among the most radioactive ever found, on par with those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At one site, Soviet scholars found a skeleton which had a radioactive level 50 times greater than normal. Other cities have been found in northern India that show indications of explosions of great magnitude. One such city, found between the Ganges and the mountains of Rajmahal, seems to have been subjected to intense heat. Huge masses of walls and foundations of the ancient city are fused together, literally vitrified! And since there is no indication of a volcanic eruption at Mohenjo-Daro or at the other cities, the intense heat to melt clay vessels can only be explained by an atomic blast or some other unknown weapon. The cities were wiped out entirely.

More significantly, it states that one could save himself by removing all metal from his person and immersing himself in the water of rivers. The reason can only be in order to wash away contaminated particles—the exact procedure followed today.

A seven-year-old girl literally felt a legend coming to life as she unearthed a huge sword from the same lake King Arthur’s Excalibur was said to have been thrown. A sceptical father, however, said he does not believe in the sword’s fabled origins.

Scientists have found a hidden chamber in Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, the first such discovery in the structure since the 19th century and one likely to spark a new surge of interest in the pharaohs.

In an article published in the journal Nature on Thursday, an international team said the 30-meter (yard) void deep within the pyramid is situated above the structure’s Grand Gallery, and has a similar cross-section. The purpose of the chamber is unclear, and it’s not yet known whether it was built with a function in mind.

The seemingly empty region, which the researchers neutrally call “the void,” is at least a hundred feet long. Its purpose remains unclear; researchers are cautiously avoiding the word “chamber” for the time being.

“We don’t know for the moment if it’s horizontal or inclined, [or] if it is made from one structure or several successive structures,” said study coauthor Mehdi Tayoubi, president and cofounder of the Heritage Innovation Presentation (HIP) Institute, in a press briefing. “What we do know is that this void is there, that it is impressive, [and] that it was not expected by any kind of theory.”

And to those fantasizing about personally exploring the void, a word of caution. No known corridors connect to the space, and researchers and outside experts alike stress that there are no future plans to drill into the void. Instead, they say that in the near-term, they will do whatever they can to peer into the space non-invasively.

“There’s lots of heavy, thick rock, and by drilling something, you don’t know how you will affect the entire thing,” says Ikram. “If there’s something behind the Mona Lisa, would you want to wipe her clean and see what’s behind her? You really have to preserve the integrity of the monument.”

In 2016, the same researchers reported that they'd found void space behind the north face of the pyramid.

Reactions to the new announcement within the Egyptology community were mixed.

"The void can be another chamber or a gallery, an aerial shaft, or an architectural fault that was sealed off," said Monica Hanna, an archaeologist, Egyptologist and founder of Egypt's Heritage Task Force, which focuses on protecting ancient sites. Hanna said nondestructive methods of studying the pyramids were a valuable way to investigate the original design of the pyramid without having to destroy parts of the structure.

Hawass was more dismissive.

"We have to always be very careful about the word void, because the Great Pyramid is filled with voids," he said. The builders of the pyramid set stones of varying size and shape in its core, Hawass said, so the whole structure is riddled with gaps. The original designers of the pyramid also left sealed-off construction tunnels. Identifying these voids has more to do with publicity than with advancing knowledge of the pyramid, Hawass said.

"It has nothing to do with any secret rooms or anything inside the Great Pyramid," Hawass said. He said he and his colleagues on the committee that reviews findings from Giza plan to author a paper explaining what they prefer to call "anomalies" from an Egyptology standpoint.